The role of resilience and perseverance of effort among Chinese EFL teachers' work engagement

Teachers' work engagement is associated with constructive results concerning work-associated well-being. Regarding the substantial power of teachers' work engagement in academic domains, consideration has been paid to scrutinizing the predictors of this concept. Therefore, this paper makes an effort to examine the predictors of work engagement among English as foreign language (EFL) teachers by checking a model that takes into account their perseverance of effort and resilience. To this end, 537 Chinese EFL teachers from diverse colleges participated in the study. After assuring the participants' willingness to participate, the three questionnaires, namely resilience, perseverance of effort, and work engagement were administered to them. Then the collected data were checked through the Modified Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Model and structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicated that there is a significant and direct association between work engagement and resilience along with perseverance, with resilience serving as the best predictor for teachers' work engagement. Indeed, the values indicate that about 76 percent of changes in their work engagement can be predicted by their resilience; about 66 percent of changes in their work engagement can be predicted by their perseverance. Results from the study evince recommendations for the development of Positive Psychology and related issues in research and practice to help teachers and learners improve their work engagement by focusing on their resilience and perseverance of effort.